When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in
central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.
He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
farming.
He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
more each day.
* * * * *
My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
suddenly.
* * * * *
I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.
* * * * *
As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
would have imagined there was a houseful of people.
* * * * *
My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.
As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big
house which stood back under the trees, aloof from the wide, dusty road
that led to the mills.
With us lived my young, unmarried aunt, Millie....
My grandmother had no education. She could barely read and write.
And she believed in everybody.
She was stout ... sparse-haired ... wore a switch ... had kindly,
confiding, blue eyes.
Beggars, tramps, pack-peddlers, book-agents, fortune-tellers,--she lent
a credulous ear to all,--helped others when we ourselves needed help,
signed up for preposterous articles on "easy" monthly payments,--gave
away food, starving her appetite and ours.
When, child though I was, even I protested, she would say, "well,
Johnnie, you might be a tramp some day, and how would I feel if I
thought some one was turning you away hungry?"
* * * * *
My Grandfather Gregory was a little, alert, erect, suave man,--he was a
man whose nature was such that he would rather gain a dollar by some
cheeky, brazen, off-colour practice than earn a hundred by honest
methods.
He had keen grey eyes that looked you in the face in utter, disarming
frankness. He was always immaculately dressed. He talked continually
about money, and about how people abused his confidence and his trust in
men. But there was a sharpness like pointed needles in the pupils of his
eyes that betrayed his true nature.
Coming to Mornington as one of the city's pioneers, at first he had kept
neck to neck in social prestige with the Babsons, Guelders, and the
rest, and had built the big house that my grandmother, my aunt, and
myself now lived in, on Mansion avenue....
When the Civil War broke out, that streak of adventure and daring in my
grandfather which in peace times turned him to shady financial
transactions, now caused him to enlist. And before the end of the war he
had gone far up in the ranks.
After the war he came into still more money by a manufacturing business
which he set up. But the secret process of the special kind of material
which he manufactured he inveigled out of a comrade in arms. The latter
never derived a cent from it. My grandfather stole the patent, taking it
out in his own name. The other man had trusted him, remembering the
times they had fought shoulder to shoulder, and had bivouacked
together....
My grandfather, though so small as to be almost diminutive, was spry and
brave as an aroused wasp when anyone insulted him. Several times he
faced down burly-bodied men who had threatened to kill him for his
getting the better of them in some doubtful business transaction.
For a long time his meanness and sharp dealings were reserved for
outsiders and he was generous with his family. And my sweet, simple, old
grandmother belonged to all the societies, charitable and otherwise, in
town ... but she was not, never could be "smart." She was always saying
and doing naïve things from the heart. And soon she began to disapprove
of my grandfather's slick business ways.
I don't know just what tricks he put over ... but he became _persona non
grata_ in local business circles ... and he took to running about the
country, putting through various projects here and there ... this
little, dressy, hard-faced man ... like a cross between a weasel and a
bird!
He dropped into Mornington, and out again, each time with a wild,
restless story of fortunes to be made or in the making!
Once he came home and stayed for a longer time than usual. During this
stay he received many letters. My grandmother noticed a furtiveness in
his manner when he received them. My grandmother noticed that her
husband always repaired immediately to the outhouse when he received a
letter.
She followed after him one day, and found fragments of a torn letter
cast below ... she performed the disagreeable task of retrieving the
fragments, of laboriously piecing them together and spelling them out.
She procured a divorce as quietly as possible. Then my grandfather made
his final disappearance. I did not see him again till I was quite grown
up.
All support of his numerous family ceased. His sons and daughters had to
go to work while still children, or marry.
My Aunt Alice married a country doctor whom I came to know as "Uncle
Beck." My Uncle Joe, who inherited my grandfather's business-sense, with
none of his crookedness, started out as a newsboy, worked his way up to
half-proprietorship in a Mornington paper ... the last I heard of him he
had money invested in nearly every enterprise in town, and had become a
substantial citizen.
My father still pursued his nomadic way of living, sending, very seldom,
driblets of money to my grandmother for my support ... my uncle Jim went
East to work ... of my uncle Landon I shall tell you later on.
* * * * *
The big house in which my grandmother, my Aunt Millie, and I lived was
looking rather seedy by this time. The receding tide of fashion and
wealth had withdrawn far off to another section of the rapidly growing
city ... and, below and above, the Steel Mills, with their great,
flaring furnaces, rose, it seemed, over night, one after one ... and a
welter of strange people we then called the "low Irish" came to work in
them, and our Mansion Avenue became "Kilkenny Row." And a gang of tough
kids sprang up called the "Kilkenny Cats," with which my gang used to
fight.
After the "Low Irish" came the "Dagoes" ... and after them the "Hunkies"
... each wilder and more poverty-stricken than the former.
* * * * *
The Industrial Panic of '95 (it was '95, I think) was on ... always very
poor since the breaking up of our family, now at times even bread was
scarce in the house.
I was going to school, scrawny and freckle-faced and ill-nourished. I
had a pet chicken that fortunately grew up to be a hen. It used to lay
an egg for me nearly every morning during that hard time.
* * * * *
My early remembrances of school are chiefly olfactory. I didn't like the
dirty boy who sat next to me and spit on his slate, rubbing it clean
with his sleeve. I loved the use of my yellow, new sponge, especially
after the teacher had taught me all about how it had grown on the bottom
of the ocean, where divers had to swim far down to bring it up, slanting
through the green waters. But the slates of most of the boys stunk
vilely with their spittle.
I didn't like the smell of the pig-tailed little girls, either. There
was a close soapiness about them that offended me. And yet they
attracted me. For I liked them in their funny, kilt-like, swinging
dresses. I liked the pudginess of their noses, the shiny apple-glow of
their cheeks.
It was wonderful to learn to make letters on a slate. To learn to put
down rows of figures and find that one and one, cabalistically, made
two, and two and two, four!
It always seemed an age to recess. And the school day was as long as a
month is now.
We were ready to laugh at anything ... a grind-organ in the street, a
passing huckster crying "potatoes," etc.
I have few distinct memories of my school days. I never went to
kindergarten. I entered common school at the age of eight.
My grandfather, after his hegira from Mornington, left behind his
library of travels, lives of famous American Statesmen and Business
Men, and his Civil War books. Among these books were four treasure
troves that set my boy's imagination on fire. They were _Stanley's
Adventures in Africa_, Dr. Kane's Book of _Polar Explorations_, _Mungo
Park_, and, most amazing of all, a huge, sensational book called _Savage
Races of the World_ ... this title was followed by a score of harrowing
and sensational sub-titles in rubric. I revelled and rolled in this book
like a colt let out to first pasture. For days and nights, summer and
winter, I fought, hunted, was native to all the world's savage regions
in turn, partook gleefully of strange and barbarous customs, naked and
skin-painted. I pushed dug-outs and canoes along tropic water-ways where
at any moment an enraged hippopotamus might thrust up his snout and
overturn me, crunching the boat in two and leaving me a prey to
crocodiles ... I killed birds of paradise with poison darts which I blew
out of a reed with my nostrils ... I burned the houses of white settlers
... even indulged shudderingly in cannibal feasts.
The one thing that pre-eminently seized my imagination in _Savage Races
of the World_ was the frontispiece,--a naked black rushing full-tilt
through a tropical forest, his head of hair on fire, a huge
feather-duster of dishevelled flame ... somehow this appealed to me as
especially romantic. I dreamed of myself as that savage, rushing
gloriously through a forest, naked, and crowned with fire like some
primitive sun-god. It never once occurred to me how it would hurt to
have my hair burning!
* * * * *
When Aunt Millie was taken down with St. Vitus's dance, it afforded me
endless amusement. She could hardly lift herself a drink out of a full
dipper without spilling two-thirds of the contents on the ground.
Uncle Beck, the Pennsylvania Dutch country doctor who married Aunt
Alice, came driving in from Antonville, five miles away, once or twice a
week to tend to Millie, free, as we were too poor to pay for a doctor. I
remember how Uncle Beck caught me and whipped me with a switch. For I
constantly teased Aunt Millie to make her scream and cry.
* * * * *
"Granma," I used to call out, on waking in the morning....
"Yes, Johnnie darling, what is it?"
"Granma, yesterday ... in the woods back of Babson's barn, I killed
three Indians, one after the other." (The funny part of it was that I
believed this, actually, as soon as the words left my mouth.)
A silence....
"Granma, don't you believe me?"
"Yes, of course, I believe you."
Aunt Millie would strike in with--"Ma, why do you go on humouring
Johnnie while he tells such lies? You ought to give him a good
whipping."
"The poor little chap ain't got no mother!"
"Poor little devil! If you keep on encouraging him this way he'll become
one of the greatest liars in the country."
A colloquy after this sort took place more than once. It gave me
indescribable pleasure to narrate an absurd adventure, believe it myself
in the telling of it, and think others believed me. Aunt Millie's scorn
stung me like a nettle, and I hated her.
In many ways I tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of
nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her
dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them
straddle the banisters.
* * * * *
We took in boarders. We had better food. It was good to have meat to eat
every day.
Among the boarders was a bridge builder named Elton Reeves. Elton had a
pleasant, sun-burnt face and a little choppy moustache beneath which his
teeth glistened when he smiled.
He fell, or pretended to fall, in love with gaunt, raw-boned Millie.
At night, after his day's work, he and Millie would sit silently for
hours in the darkened parlour,--silent, except for an occasional murmur
of voices. I was curious. Several times I peeked in. But all I could see
was the form of my tall aunt couched half-moonwise in Elton Reeve's lap.
I used to wonder why they sat so long and still, there in the
darkness....
* * * * *
Once a grown girl of fourteen named Minnie came to visit a sweet little
girl named Martha Hanson, whose consumptive widower-father rented two
rooms from my grandmother. They put Minnie to sleep in the same bed with
me....
After a while I ran out of the bedroom into the parlour where the
courting was going on.
"Aunt Millie, Minnie won't let me sleep."
Millie did not answer. Elton guffawed lustily.